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New gTLDs

ICANN published the Sunrise Period for Google’s latest new gTLD .APP, which opens for registrations beginning on March 29, 2018.

Google won the rights to operate the .APP registry in 2015 after bidding over 25 million dollars at a heated 2-day ICANN auction. To this day, it remains one of the highest winning bids for a new gTLD in the ICANN auction process.

The New gTLD topic has proven to be fairly complex one. To date, it has been very difficult to get an accurate read on the adoption of these new platforms.

With policy initiatives underway that may result in a second new gTLD application round in 2019-2020, we thought it would be a good time to take a step back, examine the data and survey the landscape to gain a more informed perspective on where new gTLDs are and where they may be headed. We also thought it would be a good time to explore and understand the corporate community’s overall thoughts on the topic as we get closer to a second round.

ICANN’s New gTLD Program has always been regarded with some degree of skepticism from the intellectual property community. After all, in-house counsels tasked with protecting trademarks online previously had to only consider a few legacy top-level domains like .com and